The Blind Spot

Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience

De: Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, Evan Thompson

Narrado por: Perry Daniels

In The Blind Spot, astrophysicist Adam Frank, theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser, and philosopher Evan Thompson call for a revolutionary scientific worldview, where science includes-rather than ignores or tries not to see-humanity's lived experience as an inescapable part of our search for objective truth. They urge practitioners to reframe how science works for the sake of our future in the face of the planetary climate crisis and increasing science denialism.

When we try to understand reality only through external physical things imagined from this outside position, we lose sight of the necessity of experience. This is the Blind Spot, which the authors show lies behind our scientific conundrums about time and the origin of the universe, quantum physics, life, AI and the mind, consciousness, and Earth as a planetary system. The authors propose an alternative vision: scientific knowledge is a self-correcting narrative made from the world and our experience of it evolving together.

The Blind Spot goes where no science book goes, urging us to create a new scientific culture that views ourselves both as an expression of nature and as a source of nature's self-understanding, so that humanity can flourish in the new millennium.

©2024 Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson (P)2024 Tantor

A point that needed to be made.

The Blind Spot makes an important point about the flaws and paradoxes that arise from common philosophical attitudes among scientists. The authors demonstrate that scientific thinking can be separated from these attitudes.

Good book.

A much needed injection of humility into our divided world. Stupid fifteen word minimum. I was so concise, and now I must blather.

Dense audiobook but intriguing read

This is pretty dense for an audiobook, but my bigger issue is who this book is for. I’m an academic but not a scientist or a philosopher, and I felt like this book assumed that readers would already have a specialist’s knowledge in places. Intriguing read nonetheless.

a resource worth reading in parallel to listening

opening physics chapters shruggable, but comes into its own with biological, AI, consciousness, and biosphere. IMO too dense for a stand-alone audiobook, but still the content is worth engaging with. Missed the mesoscale concepts of material science, like bending paperclip till fatigue failure -- that's an expression of physical duration.